SMALL MICROFILM ORDERS | Less than 20 rolls of microfilm

Microfilm Small Order Form (835KB PDF)

Creekside Digital loves small orders! For orders up to 20 standard rolls of microfilm (100′ rolls), we’re pleased to offer flat-rate pricing for 16mm and 35mm rollfilm scanning. That means no guessing how many images you have or how much your order will cost!

Got more than 20 rolls of film, duplex film, or rolls longer than 100′? Submit a Request for Quote through this website or contact us for more info — we’ll be glad to discuss all the options and review our volume-based pricing with you.

Typically, once we receive your film, it takes about one week for orders up to ten rolls before we ship your film back to you. For orders over ten rolls, plan on one-and-a-half to two weeks before we ship your film back to you. We ship all small orders via USPS Priority Mail unless expedited (see below). Creekside Digital will contact you if your order will be overly delayed for any reason.

Unfortunately, no. Most of the effort goes into setting up the scanner to get the best possible images from your film, so with small orders, partial scans aren’t possible. You can always go back later and delete / remove the unwanted images yourself.

Most of the image files we create for small orders are multipage PDF files. Essentially, you get one big PDF file for each roll you send us, with each frame on your film represented as a page in the file. PDF is a great format because it is very common and uses a viewer which is available for free (you can get it here) to allow you to easily view, search (with OCR), save, print, and email your images on any computer. JPEGs are another widely-used image format, but they are only available one-image-per-file and typically require a graphics program in order to view or edit them.

Yes. We’ve found that 300dpi PDFs and JPEGs will work well for over 90% of our customers, but we can provide you with just about any image format available today, including uncompressed grayscale TIFFs at very high (400 / 600dpi) resolution. Please contact us if you need a different image format or resolution.

OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, is a process that extracts text from the images we create from your microfilm. Creekside Digital uses it to create an invisible layer of digital text behind your images, yielding searchable PDF files (meaning that it can be copied / pasted, and you can type in a keyword such as a place-name or surname found on a newspaper page, and Adobe Reader will find it for you in your microfilm). Note that while OCR works very well with typewritten text, it is limited in its ability to recognize handwritten text and does not work at all with cursive writing. OCR is only an option when you choose PDFs as your image format.